Rumors of Rain: A Novel of Corruption and Redemption

By Andre Brink

Martin Mynhardt seems invincible. Violence surrounds him, yet he remains unscathed: a woman asks him the time, then leaps in front of a train; after a mine riot, he watches hoses sweep scattered body parts off the floor.

Just before the shocking violence that brings South African apartheid to an end, Martin decides to return to the family farm for a weekend. A highly successful businessman and Afrikaans Nationalist, he hopes to sell the property to the government in a deal both highly profitable and corrupt. The moment he steps onto the farm, his plans are derailed. The repercussions of a society's endemic violence catch up to him, and shake the relationships that frame his life.

His closest friend, a brilliant, idealistic lawyer, is sentenced to prison for his anti-apartheid "terrorist" activities — in part because Martin refused to help him. His son, recently returned from the Angolan war, is in silent revolt against the values of his father and his nation. His mistress, Bea, an intelligent, strong-willed woman who offers Martin the hope of redemption through her own capacity for empathy, is also caught up in the gathering political storm. This is Andre Brink's story of a society on the edge of collapse, spurred to profound self realization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Apr 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781402236020

Andre Brink

André Brink is one of South Africa's most distinguished writers. His books include An Instant in the Wind and Rumours of Rain, both of which were short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

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Copyright

© 1978, 2008 by André Brink

Cover and internal design © 2008 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

Cover photo © Getty Images

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

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First published in Great Britain by W. H. Allen & Company Ltd. 1978

First published in the United States of America by William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1978

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brink, André Philippus.

[Rumours of rain]

Rumors of rain / André Brink.

p. cm.

Originally published as: Rumours of rain.

1. Businesspeople—South Africa—Fiction.

2. Afrikaners—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9369.3.B7R8 2008

823—dc22

2007040703

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Memo

Friday

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Saturday

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

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9

Sunday

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Monday

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

About the Author

Back Cover

this land asking for water is given blood

this land which carries the fire within it

—Breyten Breytenbach

Memo

Gnats. A whole swarm of gnats plastered on the windscreen and the wipers out of order. This, senseless as it may seem, is the first image to present itself whenever I try to recall that weekend. And it is just not good enough any longer. Let me put it this way: it is time I cleared up the ambiguities about exactly what happened in the course of those few days, from Friday to Monday. A curious thing to admit, since I was fully alive to what was happening all the time. Yet I’ve always felt that something must have escaped me, a submarine something—the way one sometimes wakes up knowing one has had a dream of tremendous importance, if only one can grope back towards it, rowing upstream against the sluggish water; but in the end the dream remains beyond one’s grasp.

I have simply not had the time for exploring it. If one is occupied, for twelve to fifteen hours a day, with meetings and memorandums, consultations, options, decisions, timetables and travels, time for a private life or for re-examining the past becomes a luxury and memories almost obscene. Now, suddenly and quite unforeseen, I find myself with nine days in London, an existence in transit between the conference of the United Nations Association, from which our delegation was forced to withdraw this morning, and my next negotiations in Tokyo not due until Thursday week.

I truly cannot remember when last I had this experience. It came so unexpectedly that I’m quite overwhelmed. Whenever during the past ten years or so I allowed myself a break of a week or a fortnight, I was accompanied by the rest of the family—Elise and Louis and Ilse —either to the sea or to the farm. Even so I usually returned earlier on my own to catch up with work. During that particular weekend, too, Louis was with me. Admittedly there were the occasional lost days or weekends, but then prearranged and with a fixed goal, with Bea. Once, two years ago, we had a full week in Mozambique, the last time before Lourenço Marques became Maputo. The sandy road to the south, the violent and vulgar purple of bougainvillaea, tatty gardens and scraggy fowls, emaciated Blacks waving and grinning in the dust, and at sunset the red and yellow bungalows of Ponta do Ouro. I remember our curious isolation, deprived of radio and newspapers, and the company of Portuguese soldiers in their dilapidated khaki trucks, accompanied by the small crippled Black boy they had with them as a mascot; and at night, when the day’s dull accumulated heat drove us from the bungalow, we slept on the beach, resigned to attacks by mosquitoes, sand-fleas and God knows what other heathen pests.

But this time it is different. I am utterly and irredeemably alone. Without any planning or prearrangement I am left with these nine days on my hands. In a way it is quite terrifying; at the same time I feel dazed by the almost sensual luxury of the experience. Here I am with no one to consider and nothing to account for. No dead to bury, no arrangements to make, no guilt to explain or exorcise. Just left completely to myself. Nobody even knows in which hotel I’m staying.

Of course I could have returned to Johannesburg with the rest of the mission earlier this evening as I would have done without hesitation a year ago. But that would have meant two extra flights within a week and something inside me resents the thought. Weariness? Apathy? Middle-aged inertia? Perhaps, sooner or later, one inevitably reaches this stage of simply feeling either unwilling or unable to go on before clearing up whatever lies behind in order to catch up with oneself. And now this coincidence has suddenly made it possible to indulge myself. It may in fact be more of a need than a luxury. It is difficult to explain this cornered feeling. I have to write myself out of it. It is reputed to be a form of therapy.

Is it only a retrospective illusion or was there indeed something unreal about that weekend? Even something apocalyptic, although I hesitate to use the word? In my more romantic days, when I still seriously thought of writing as a career, I might have described it as the last weekend before the end of the familiar world, or some equally melodramatic phrase. But I have shed my romanticism long ago and even my sense of humor is, according to Bea, no more than the positive side of my cynicism.

What was at stake was the future of the farm. As simple as that. But it involved more than a piece of land. If I may try to define it at this early stage I believe one may call it a sense of loss. (So much can come to an end simultaneously even though one fails to recognize it as an end at the time.) I can specify a fourfold loss. A father, a son, a woman, a friend. Perhaps even these are no more than tokens, symptoms.

But I must try not to presume, however difficult I find it, conditioned as I am by half a lifetime devoted to figures, statistics, programs and prognoses, all the projects of Free Enterprise. I must try to come to grips with a larger and clearer landscape beyond the diversity of facts. Yet without the sentimental self-exposure fashionable in certain circles, since my Calvinist heritage frowns on such a striptease of the soul.

Exclusively for myself, I must take stock of what I have accumulated and see what happens. An intellectual exercise, like chess. (My photographic memory has so often amazed people and influenced business deals.) Let us call it a form of mental massage relaxing the knotted muscles, soothing the nerve ends and finally, with precise timing, effecting the so-called complete relief which makes a new start possible, without any aftereffects.

***

The Thai girl (that is if she really comes from Thailand: they all lie without batting an eyelid; but she was unmistakably Oriental, quite attractive in fact) left three-quarters of an hour ago with a discreet click of the door. (DO NOT DISTURB.) I didn’t even hear her soft feet on the thick blue-grey hotel carpet, and remained with closed eyes, lying completely relaxed, the small white towel covering what Ma would call my parts. (How would a masseuse remember a client? Only by the size and shape of his prick? Or would she observe more keenly? Middle-aged gentleman, stocky but ‘distinguished’ as the phrase goes, dark hair graying at the temples, thick-rimmed glasses on a ‘Roman’ nose, rather flabby round the waist...? One forfeits a lot with the removal of one’s clothes.)

More often than not with these girls one runs into a wall of transparent lies: they pretend to be secretaries or shop assistants or even students eager to earn a few extra quid as part-time masseuses. The Orientals tend to be both more honest and more thorough, as well as more sympathetic, which is why I generally insist on them. And tonight’s Thai girl—I neglected to ask her name—had the manner of a real professional. I dislike conversation while a girl is working on me (what is there, after all, to talk about?), but some seem to regard it as part of their duties to keep the client talking. Not this one. While I was first lying on my stomach, then on my back, she quietly and calmly and thoroughly went her way, leading deftly up to the moment when, accidentally brushing against my erection, the final service could be agreed on with a mere smile, a nod, and a confirmation of the tariff involved. Without any hesitation she went to the bathroom where I could hear water running; a couple of minutes later she returned naked, looking even more frail than she had in her clothes. A delicate bird of a girl with thin wrists, narrow hips, neatly trimmed pubic triangle, and the small barely swollen breasts one would expect of a fourteen-year-old, with a tiny crucifix on a golden chain between them. Lazily I lay caressing her nipples, watching them stiffen as she demurely went about her own duties, her fringe covering her eyes.

Call it the luxury of the perfect pasha, the arrogance of the supreme male chauvinist; or simply the easiest way out for a man with a heart complaint. (I’ve never had sex since that afternoon with Bea.) Yet I am inclined to see much more in this total surrender to a woman who demands from you no more than an arranged fee and who, outside the serene hour she has shared with you (nice romantic phrase this), has no further claims on you at all. It is one of very few situations which leave one completely free because no responsibility is imposed on either of the persons involved. You are not required to prove anything or attempt anything; you need neither anticipate anything nor interpret anything; you need not go to any trouble to find out more about her past or her state of mind: all that is, in fact, precluded and irrelevant. She offers no threat to your status or your integrity or your self-sufficiency, since she in turn neither expects nor demands anything from you. She is entirely at your disposal, and provided you pay her fee she is prepared to do anything and everything you require of her.

If I ask her name she will most likely give a false one. If I ask her about herself she will undoubtedly answer with a lie, just as I would if she were to inquire about me. And yet there is in our situation an honesty more profound than that of biographical detail. There is nothing equivocal about the nature of our contract or the implications of our association; supply and demand are in perfect balance. Consequently treachery or betrayal is inconceivable and the very possibility of disappointment excluded.

This does not suggest that we despise one another. On the contrary, I feel I can assert that in our mutual exposure and reticence we respect each other. I have often had the impression of getting closer to a woman in an hour of such contact than in the course of a lengthy affair. For in any close relationship there are so many other elements involving and distracting and distorting one; you are never really left intact; inevitably the situation imposes responsibilities and inhibits liberty. Which doesn’t mean that I am trying to deny or diminish someone like Bea in any way. Perhaps I should rather admit, however unlikely or incriminating it may seem, that I still do not understand her. And of all the factors involved in that weekend she remains one of the most inexplicable and ungraspable.

***

In my wallet I carry photographs—here they are—of Elise and Ilse, my wife and daughter (in discussions with Latins this has occasionally clinched a contract); yet it is Bea I can recall most immediately. Bea in a loose sweater and denim skirt, with boots or sandals; her short black hair and narrow face with high cheekbones, her large eyes smoldering behind the dark glasses with which she habitually masked her myopia; straight nose, wide mouth, strong chin; hands with long fingers and closely bitten nails. Not beautiful, I should imagine, in conventional terms (I once served on the panel of judges in a Miss South Africa contest), but with an intensity and, well, a strangeness which became more fascinating the longer one looked at her.

Passionate Bea. In different circumstances she might have led a Simbionese army; she might have inspired crowds on barricades or thrown bombs in Belfast—if only she’d found a cause in which to believe implicitly. But quite simply too intelligent to accept anything so absolutely as to plunge headlong into it. Angry, rebellious, uncompromising, and—I suppose—lost.

Was that why I couldn’t refrain from trying to protect her? A totally misplaced urge, of course. Because deep inside her she was quite independent: For heaven’s sake stop trying to annex me. You Afrikaners are all imperialists by nature. Always want to be the boss, even in love.

You Afrikaners. How often did she use that expression? Sometimes irritably, sometimes off-hand or mocking: provocation came natural to her. Yet it has occurred to me that actually she may have envied me the certainty of that despised definition. For what could she call herself? True, she had the same green passport as I (with what hideous photograph inside!). But her mother had been Italian, her father allegedly a German officer who had arrived in Perugia at a crucial moment and soon moved on again; after the war the family left to join some distant cousins in the States; and by the time Bea was seven and her mother already dead, she emigrated to South Africa with a Hungarian stepfather. The only constant element of her youth was her Catholicism. Until, with the fierce determination characteristic of her, she broke away from that as well. One has got to stand on one’s own feet. I don’t need any crutches. And I want to look the world squarely in the face. Even though she constantly wore those sunglasses.

This fear of crutches or blindness or dependence on others, anything that could be construed as an easy way out, determined much of our relationship. Sex, for instance, played a relatively minor part whereas in all my other fleeting liaisons through the years it was the only raison d’etre. I’ve often wondered: if there had been more sex between us, would the relationship have foundered like all the others? In which case I would have been freed from her. The sexual bond was there, but kept very much in the background. Not through any wish of mine: but Bea had a will and hang-ups of her own. And yet I’ve never known a more passionate woman, on the few occasions when she really let herself go. Actually I suspect that what inhibited her was basically the very fear of knowing how passionate, in fact, she was. Perhaps she was afraid of being swept away by her feelings and consequently by any other person involved in them. She was determined to remain in control.

Except for those few times. Our first night—the evening of the roaring party in Aunt Rienie’s small apartment choked by nearly a hundred guests, the drinking and perspiration and noise, chairs splintering and bottles breaking, and the frail old lady in the middle of the floor, oblivious of it all, reading Blake, with tears running down her rouged and powdered cheeks; and much later, the rustling of the wind in the leaves of the plane trees in front of the open window, and the obtrusive awareness of Bernard sleeping next door.

And then, of course, the afternoon we met for lunch at the hole. We’d often arranged to meet at Dullabh’s Corner from where we’d go to the small curry place in the block, or to a discreet restaurant in Hillbrow, or somewhere out of town. I can no longer remember how it first became our place: the choice may have been influenced by the din and color of an otherwise rather squalid district, since Bea always responded to that sort of robust street life. (Remember Diagonal Street.) Then there was a break of a month or so, nothing unusual. I was off to New York, returning via Brazil; other business came up—and when I finally turned up at Dullabh’s Corner that afternoon there was nothing but an enormous hole where the buildings had been. It took some time to connect it with newspaper reports about Indian shopkeepers removed by the government to another group area, angry demonstrations and resistance, and forcible eviction (nothing serious: only a couple of injured and some children bitten by police dogs).

I can’t recall any strong feelings one way or the other in myself—one does grow immune—but Bea was very upset. There was something quite surprising about the violence of her reaction, which I found hard to reconcile with the woman I thought I knew. (But of course I shouldn’t forget about the war. She’d been only three years old when she left for the States with her mother, but who can tell what remains submerged in the mind of a child? And there must have been many bombardments in Italy at the time.)

When I arrived at Dullabh’s Corner there was no sign of her yet. As a result of the demolition there was more than enough parking space, so I got out to peer through a slit in the corrugated iron fence at bulldozers and cranes and men in orange helmets at work among the heaps of rubble. The sort of activity which had fascinated me since childhood. And it was only when Bea grabbed me by the arm that I discovered her presence.

She said something like: Oh here you are. I was afraid I wouldn’t find you.

And I: But I said I’d come, didn’t I? I tried to kiss her but she turned her cheek.

Obviously I can no longer recall our dialogue in detail, only the general drift. (Perhaps I should use the opportunity to practice for my novel! At least I can try.)

She said, I thought perhaps you’d driven right past. And when I shook my head she went on: That’s what happened to me. It was several blocks before I suddenly realized.... So I turned back, and once again I drove past, looking for Dullabh’s building. How can they do a thing like this?

Didn’t you see the papers?

"Yes, but I never realized. It used to be our place, Martin!"

I couldn’t help smiling. You didn’t expect them to first ask our permission, did you?

You know very well what I mean. Through her dark glasses I could see the darker burning of her eyes. It’s as if they’ve taken something away from us. And after a moment, almost resentfully: We’ve got little enough as it is.

We’re still the same, aren’t we?

Are we? Can we even be sure of that? She turned her head as if to look at the excavation, then looked away. I know we don’t come here very often. Once every few weeks or so. And then we go off again. But still: Dullabh’s Corner—I suppose it’s ridiculous of me, but this place has always been here, always exactly the same, an ugly old landmark, comforting, reassuring. I used to think: one day you and I will be gone, but some things will remain and keep something of us alive in a way. Dullabh’s Corner will remember us. And now it’s just a hole.

I suppose one has to learn to live with holes, I said, deliberately trying to sound light-hearted. Intimations of mortality.

Strange I should have said that. (Did I really? Or am I making it up?) In the light of what happened later the same afternoon, when mortality suddenly became very real.

To continue with the dialogue:

Please let’s go, she said. I don’t ever want to come back here. I’ll go with you in your car.

What about yours?

I left it over there. She motioned. I’ll fetch it later, it’s not important. At the moment I feel too shaky.

Aren’t we going to the curry place?

No, let’s get out of town. As far away as possible.

In the car she lit a cigarette and sat smoking in silence. Traffic was bad and it took a long time to reach the M1.

Strange, she said after a while, more subdued, the way one keeps on trying to find things to hold on to. Proof of the passing moments. One never learns that a mirror can’t hold an image. Stupid, isn’t it?

Does the mirror on the wall really matter? Provided you yourself know who you are.

Are you really so sure about it?

I think so.

I don’t. With a wan smile she blew out smoke. It’s part of your illusion. Part of your arrogance. That’s what drives me up the wall about you. And perhaps that’s why I love you.

At least I’m not such a merry mixture as you are!

No, she said, staring at me through her dark glasses. But you’re an Afrikaner. And that may be worse.

***

We are Afrikaners and that identity we shall never renounce. We shall not be dictated to by anyone. Even if the rest of the world, like Gadarene swine, prefer to plunge into the abyss of permissivity caused by lack of identity we shall remain steadfast. In the freely paraphrased words of Minister Calitz at the press conference following our withdrawal from the conference this morning.

We had some problems with His Excellency. Things may have turned out differently if he’d attended last night’s reception for delegates, which still offered an occasion for last-minute lobbying. But at the cocktail party in the Embassy preceding the reception his over-enthusiastic consumption of KWV brandy, in spite of our frantic efforts, forced his early withdrawal to his hotel. (From where, it was reported, he later slipped out to Raymond’s Revue Bar et al.)

I should briefly explain our mission. The British United Nations Association organized the conference on economic development in the Third World, with an emphasis on the exploitation of mineral resources. The Afrikaans Institute of Commerce regarded it as an excellent opportunity for pushing South Africa’s leading role in this field; at the same time it could be used to negotiate a few mineral export contracts and attract new investment capital. As chairman of the Mining Chamber of the AIC I gave my wholehearted support to the project and also initiated arrangements to negotiate with a number of major importers in Stockholm, etc. But the moment Calitz learned of the conference he indicated in a very unsubtle way that he would be available to accompany the mission—with the praiseworthy objective of political bargaining under the cloak of a commercial enterprise. So it was only natural for the president of the AIC to invite His Excellency to take over the leadership of the mission.

These developments were only publicized upon our departure from Johannesburg, causing immediate repercussions in London and elsewhere: accusations of our trying to turn a meeting of economists into an international political forum etc., the sort of argument to which a British Labour government proves particularly vulnerable. From that moment the further course of events was clearly predictable. Calitz had no credentials for the conference but obviously assumed that our Embassy would arrange everything for him. When this proved impossible and he was refused admission, our entire mission had to withdraw in a show of loyalty. The sort of incident provoked regularly by people like Calitz at a stage when, God knows, we bloody well can’t afford it.

What else could one have expected of the man? When he became Minister his only claim to fame was a Hitler moustache, which had shrunk with the years until it resembled nothing so much as a blotch of silver snot on his upper lip. It must be conceded, I suppose, that he did his best to serve the interests of the South African economy by acquiring directorships in various companies, as well as a wine farm in the Western Province, a sheep farm in the Free State, a hunting farm in the South-West, and a strategic block of land in the Eastern Cape. At one stage he also owned a hotel and a holiday resort in Transkei, but those he soon sold, at three times the original price, to the South African government who promptly transferred it, at twenty percent of the amount, as a gesture of goodwill to two prominent members of the Transkei Cabinet.

After Calitz had left on his Soho exploits last night a few of us delegates met with the Ambassador to compose a diplomatically worded statement to be issued in the event of our forced withdrawal from today’s conference. And when the foreseeable happened I handed the document to His Excellency. Perhaps it would have been better for someone else to have done so, as there isn’t much love lost between Calitz and myself (see later, when the Eastern Cape affair is discussed: for on the practical level that was the motivation for the entire apocalyptic weekend I am concerned with). Deliberately ignoring our cautious formulation and obviously playing to the gallery at home, he called a press conference to make it clear to these bastards once and for all that we won’t be trodden on.

I had to swallow my annoyance, knowing better than to clash with a man like him in public. I’ll get even with him in good time, just as I got even with him that weekend. But I must admit that his performance thwarted me personally. The paper I was to have read at the conference (The Strategic Value of South Africa’s Mineral Resources to the West) was aimed at the sort of reaction, abroad as well as at home, which would have aided me in becoming president of the AIC within about two years. For twenty years, ever since Elise and I returned from my studies overseas, I’ve been planning my career like a game of chess. Legal adviser; PRO for the mining house. And when the moment came to take the plunge and become an entrepreneur in my own right (the details are of no concern), I was ready for it. The rest was simple logic: buying out small worked-out mines which had become unprofitable for the large companies; prospecting and buying options until I could field my own team of geologists; shares; moving in at the right moment with takeovers and consortiums; property deals: all the time, thanks to my contacts in the Cabinet and elsewhere, staying just one step ahead of the others. The constant careful maneuvering within the AIC, based on the calculation that the Afrikaner was still a newcomer to mining, which meant that competition was less fierce than in other areas of industry. So I chose that as my field of action, attending AGMs to be seen, supporting key figures, seconding proposals, later introducing my own motions, and getting elected to the executive. Like a general planning his strategies. Until I have now reached the top, with my headquarters on the eleventh and twelfth floors of the premises in Main Street. My own building (one of my shrewdest coups in a takeover). My personal domain. The spacious office, modernized with carpets and perspex and potted plants, watched over by my eagle-eyed secretary (fortyish and efficient: ever since the episode with Marlene I prefer a middle-aged lady in this position), and the rest of my staff within immediate reach. Public officer, chief accountant, personnel manager, consultant geologist, consultant engineer; and the juniors, ranging from draughtsmen to typists (these are both young and attractive, and eagerly at the disposal of the boss). None of this came to me by chance. Nothing has happened through fate or fortune. Everything has been planned and worked for. And this London conference had been intended to give me another indispensable push, now temporarily undone through Calitz’s criminal bungling. (And I am not his only victim: the country as a whole will suffer the results.)

Still, in public one remains loyal. We Afrikaners have our own way of doing things. And in the eyes of the world our delegation stood by our leader. Immediately after the press conference all the other members of the mission returned to South Africa with His Excellency.

***

I moved to this hotel. Not that I had much against the first one in fashionable Mayfair, except perhaps that, at twenty-five pounds a day (plus VAT) they did not even offer a cup of morning tea without charge (only the cockroaches were free). But with what in my early romantic period I would have called a blinding clarity I just knew the time had come for me to be alone and incognito until I must fly to Tokyo.

In a curious state of elation about this sudden freedom I cabled my secretary not to expect any news from me until after Tokyo; next I phoned my wife to tell her that I was off to the Lake District for a week. She was less resigned than I’d expected.

Why don’t you rather come home, Martin?

It’s too close to the office. You know very well they won’t leave me in peace.

We can go away together for a few days. There was an unexpected fervent note in her voice. It’s such a long time since we last—

Do be reasonable, Elise. I’ve got to be in Tokyo before the end of next week.

If you catch the plane tonight you’ll be home tomorrow morning.

I just can’t face another trip. I’m tired. And I’m not getting any younger.

Nonsense, Martin. You’re forty-five. That’s nothing.

You know what the doctors said.

As if you’ve ever paid any attention to doctors. Or to anyone else for that matter.

That’s an unkind cut.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, well, that I’m also getting uptight and smothered here.

I could guess what she really meant to say. Having problems with Ma again?

What else did you expect? I know she doesn’t mean it. But she insists on taking everything out of my hands and I can’t stand it. I still think it was a terrible mistake to bring her back from the farm. She’s much too independent to live with other people.

We discussed all that long ago, Elise.

Did we? You said what you thought and that was that. A short pause. Don’t let us go through all that again on the telephone, Martin. It’s no use. I’m just upset because I thought you’d—

How’s Ilse? I interrupted.

Cavorting in the pool with her friends. Refusing to listen to anyone. She knows you’ll take her side when you come back.

For a moment I hesitated before asking: No news of Louis, I suppose?

Of course not. Her voice was strained. I wonder whether we’ll ever hear from him again. Unless something—But you’re wasting your money now, you’d better ring off. More quietly she added: Do look after yourself, Martin.

Of course. Goodbye.

Strangely discontent I sat looking at the receiver, trying to imagine Elise at home as she put down the phone (but where would she be? Bedroom or study?), following her through the house. The clear placid stone surrounding one with its reassuring coolness in these summer months; subtly heated in winter. The woolly flokatis in the bedrooms, terracotta and ceramic tiles elsewhere; the few antiques Elise had skillfully harmonized with large and comfortable modern module pieces. A few of her pots on shelves or in alcoves; her roughly woven mohair curtains covering the windows. On the walls, paintings by South African artists, including two early Pierneefs and a Wenning; also a Picasso litho and the Klee drawing I picked up in Cologne. Slasto surrounding the fireplace, built-in bookshelves on either side.

Outside, the flowing lines characteristic of most of my brother Theo’s designs, functional and satisfying in their Mediterranean echoes. The garden with its lawns and terraces, shrubs, trees (strelitzia, proteas, wistaria on the pergola, three precious cycads smuggled from the farm on the back of Dad’s truck, years ago, before the cancer and the funeral, when we still had the farm; before that fatal weekend). The tennis court behind the poplar row, the aquamarine curves of the swimming pool where Ilse and her friends were splashing at this moment.

The curiously unsettling incident of her last birthday, her fifteenth, when she and a dozen other girls were fooling around the pool in their tiny tangas (Ma: It’s just two milk doilies and a cookie cloth they’re wearing these days), as I lay in my deck chair with one eye on the newspaper and the other on those pert provocative nymphs. I suddenly glanced up to catch Louis watching them just as eagerly. (That was before Angola; before everything.) For a moment our eyes met. He blushed, and smiled to cover his embarrassment. And for the first time I realized what it meant to have a son of eighteen sharing my stealthy fervent interest in those budding bodies. But instead of feeling solidarity, I found the discovery had stirred something like guilt inside me, even resentment, as if it had revealed something much too secret of myself to him.

There was an even less wholesome sequel to the episode. While Louis and I remained in our chairs, he with his Coke and I with my beer, both pretending to be unaware of each other and those smooth girl-women, I noticed a movement behind some shrubs on the far side of the pool and saw the Black gardener. He too was peering at the scene, his spade forgotten in the ground. We’d only hired him the week before after his predecessor had left without warning. Had I known him better I might have been willing to give him another chance but these days one cannot take any risks, not with a teenage girl about the house. So I had to fire him. In any event I paid him two months’ notice, so he really had nothing to complain about.

It wasn’t easy to find a replacement. They’re asking such exorbitant wages, yet they’re reluctant to offer anything in return. Years ago one could still rely on convict labor, which was how we managed to get the garden laid out in the first place. A team of twelve once a week really works wonders. It was the same when I was a child, except then we only had them once a month: in that arid region of Griqualand West there was no point in any fancy gardening. Fourteen inches of rain a year, if it was a good year. Three inches more often than not. And when it stayed away everything just shriveled up and only dust and stones and thorn-trees remained. Our team of convicts used to eat their lunch in the sparse shade of such a thorn-tree, taking a long time over their mealie porridge and their thick slices of brown bread. Often, when the guard was not looking, they asked Theo or me to smuggle them cigarettes from Dad’s box of C to C. There was one who used to ask for methylated spirits. He would up-end the bottle in his mouth and gulp it all down, just like that. Took away all his fear, he said. With that stuff down his throat they could try anything, he didn’t care a fuck. The language he used. Then came the day he tried to run away. Whoever thought a convict would try to escape in that little village with its dusty streets and pepper trees, surrounded by an infinity of barren plains? But he did, true as God. And just as he was climbing the fence the guard emerged from the outdoor lavatory, buckling his belt. I was standing in the back door with a slice of bread and golden syrup; Theo was still spreading his in the kitchen. The convict looked round and began to run, followed by the guard. Consternation in the backyard. Ma’s red and black fowls jumping up from where they’d been lying with spread wings under a broombush, their yellow eyelids half-closed. The guard was much too corpulent to catch up with the convict. So he shot him. The meths drinker dropped down in the dust, kicking like a sheep with its throat cut. The guard waddled towards him, tearing his khaki uniform as he scrambled through the fence, and started kicking him where he lay with his back broken, kicking and kicking until, unable to take any more, I fled into the kitchen. There was a commotion of people and voices. The Black Maria came. Through the kitchen window I saw them pick him up, hurling him into the back of the van like a bag of potatoes, a ragged little bundle of blood and dust. When I turned round all I saw was the cluster of black flies on the slither of flypaper hanging from the bulb.

Why did the man kick him like that, Dad? I asked the next day. He couldn’t run any more.

One can’t take chances with a kaffìr, my boy. His kind, vulnerable eyes looked at me through his spectacles. He was a criminal and he tried to escape. If you go back in our history…. That was his stock defense and solution to everything. If you go back in our history. It was his subject, after all; he was one of the few people I’ve ever known to be completely happy in their work. Very few outsiders could understand how on earth a man could take pleasure in teaching the same dreary span of history year after year. Most of the other kids at school found him boring; the only thing that kept them working was their fear of the cane with which he tried to impress his authority on boys and girls alike—something I never managed to reconcile with a person as meek as he was. Personally I drew a measure of inspiration from him, but whether this was due to the history he taught or to a quality in himself I don’t know. In a sense he always remained remote from us, with an absence in his eyes as if he was staring right past us to those distant battles and great men who seemed to suggest some sense or stature of life to him: all those causes and consequences of war, the achievements of ancient civilizations, which appeared so much more ordered and understandable at a distance than the confusion surrounding oneself. History to him was as clear in line and meaning as the shape of a fish; whereas the present appeared wild and aimless and absurd. At the same time, through an interest in history, it seemed possible occasionally to break through to him and grasp something of his silences and his absence, lending sudden and startling meaning to the word Dad.

To him, I think, history became a metaphor for everything he couldn’t understand about the world around him. And the day he was forced to abandon his career and take over the family farm something began to wither inside him. He went on reading as much as before; every week loads of books were carted from the town library to the small outbuilding on the farm which he’d converted into a study, and whatever was unobtainable there he ordered from elsewhere. But there was no longer anything he could do with it, no one he could convey his knowledge to; and it was beginning to press heavily on him. In the end cancer sent him to his grave. But to my mind that was mere coincidence. If it hadn’t been cancer it would have assumed some other form. The real cause of his death was the farm itself, that fertile valley in the Eastern Cape with its aloes and its pale-blue plumbago, its dark thickets and blood-red earth. Amazing how immediate it all returns to me here at such a distance.

Our farm. No longer, of course. All I have now is the well-kept suburban garden protected by the six-feet-high stone walls topped by broken glass, and the double wrought-iron gates with the spikes on top. Guarded by our dogs, our two magnificent Alsatians, as gentle as lambs with the children but wild wolves to any stranger. Ma can’t stand them. Quite understandably, of course, because she still misses her three unruly farm dogs. The Alsatians would have torn them limb from limb, so all I could do when she came to live with us was to have them put down. It was in their own best interest, after all.

***

Thinking back now, in this luxury hotel with its plush and velvet, blue-grey and gold, its Victorian prints on the walls and—I swear to God—Sir Joshua’s Age of Innocence above my bed, it appears to me, however distant in this setting, that all my life I’ve been surrounded by violence. Not in the way any of my quite long line of pioneer forefathers experienced it, leaving their velskoen tracks through history—the uprising of Graaff Reinet, Border Wars, Great Trek, Boer War, Rebellion, or the Ossewa-Brandwag underground movement of the Second World War. Without exception they were themselves the agents, the doers, and often the victims: men who landed in the Dark Hole of the Castle, who were killed by the spears of Kaffirs or the bullets of Englishmen, or who found their farms raided and their houses burnt, so that every time they had to start again from scratch (which, somehow or other, with the Bible on their hearts, they managed to do). My experience is different. I am surrounded by violence, yet untouched by it myself. Unlike my ancestors on their via dolorosa as Dad liked to call it, I realize only too well that I have always gone scot-free. (With the exception of that one afternoon with Bea.)

It is a strange thought, in view of some of the things which have taken place before my eyes. I have often wondered, not without cynicism, whether perhaps I have a gift for this, acting almost as a catalyst for violence which breaks out all around me yet leaves me unscarred.

Would that convict have run away and got himself killed if I hadn’t been standing there in the back door eating my bread and golden syrup? A preposterous thought, admittedly—if it had been an isolated incident. But it wasn’t. I can recall at random: Theo and I playing a Tarzan game in the pepper tree; after jumping from a high branch I dare him to follow me, which he does, breaking his leg. A group of boys playing in the river which skirts the village. One of them is scared to dive from the top of a willow. Come on, don’t be a sissy! I shout at him. So he dives into the muddy water and doesn’t come up again. His head has struck a submerged log. We manage to haul him out and his life is saved, but he remains paralyzed from the waist down. The most gruesome and at the same time the most comic episode: in my third year at university I was standing beside the road, just outside Bellville, hitchhiking to Cape Town, when a lorry came past, loaded with building rubble, a couple of sheets of corrugated iron protruding on one side. A motorcycle swerved out to pass from behind but the poor bastard probably never noticed the iron sheets. And when I became aware of what had happened, a headless man came whizzing past me on his cycle, a red fountain of blood spouting from his neck.

There was Greta, my varsity girlfriend, riding past me on her bicycle just a week after we’d broken off. As she sat up and turned round to call to me, the bicycle swerved and struck a tractor pulling a trailer piled high with boxes of purple grapes.

Charl Kamfer, brilliant lecturer (History of Art), witty and cynical and homosexual. The night I phoned him on a sudden impulse to ask whether I could come round; the house blazing with light when I arrived, all the doors and windows wide open; and his naked body lying on its back on the carpet in the lounge, wrists cut, and a neat blue circle painted round his navel.

At Park Station, the woman jumping in front of the train a moment after she’d asked me the time.

After the mine riots, the bits and pieces of human bodies washed from the road with fire hoses, the way one would clean gnats from a windscreen; like rain trying to wash out the scars of drought (but something always remains).

And I suppose I should add the murder on the farm, that weekend. And perhaps, if one thinks of it, even Bernard; even Bea. Or am I going too far?

In a sense that whole weekend had been conceived and born in violence. Perhaps it was the first presentiment of an apocalypse. I’d better write it down: it makes a good situation for a novel.

I hadn’t slept much the previous night. Normally I would have set out by six in the morning for it’s nearly five hundred miles to the farm. But I had to go to the Supreme Court in Pretoria first. In the early stages of the trial it had still been possible not to go, but in the end—except when the riots at Westonaria forced me to stay away—I felt a compulsion to attend every session. Only the conclusion still lay ahead, that Friday. I’d told Elise that there was some work I first had to finish off, as I somehow found it impossible to discuss anything about the trial with her. With Louis I’d arranged that I would meet him at the parking lot in Pretoria. For some reason he’d gone there several days before.

Reviews for Rumors of Rain

[vaellus · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

If you took the best 15 pages out of this book, it would be a very good 15 pages. But there are about 400 other pages. This is a tendentious novel written as a retrospective rambling by a less than admirable Afrikaner businessman. It does cohere into a surprisingly dramatic whole in the end, but getting there through the thicket of trifle and annoyance is a trudge.

[bodachliath · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Brink's narrator Martin Mynhardt must have been constructed to personify the most unpalatable elements of apartheid South Africa and its Afrikaner ruling class. He is a rich and successful businessman and mine owner, who is arrogant, insensitive, exploitative, and misogynistic. As a narrative voice this takes some getting used to, but Brink's talent is such that one almost feels sorry for him by the end of this tale, which sees the cosy complacencies of his world, and his attempts to keep its various elements separate, dismantled piece by piece over the course of a long weekend. He emerges as a nuanced character, deeply flawed but very human. The portrayals of his friends and family are skilfully drawn but also somewhat symbolic - his best friend Bernard is a lawyer who has decided he has to fight the system and is on trial, and his son Louis has come back from military service in Angola deeply disillusioned and questioning. The foreground events of the story cover Martin's reminiscences of a trip with his son to visit his mother on the family farm, which he needs to persuade his mother to agree to leave and sell. The narrative is full of asides and back stories, with many events and people alluded to long before their stories are revealed in detail. The events of the book seem all the more relevant given what happened a dozen years later - Brink's analysis of why the system had to change is impressive, perceptive and prophetic

[widsith_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There comes a day when, for the first time, violence is used not because it is unavoidable but because it is easier. There comes a day when, for the first time, a leader is allowed to promote his own interests simply because he happens to be the leader. There comes a day when, for the first time, the weak one is exploited, not in ignorance but because he cannot offer resistance. There comes a day when, for the first time, a verdict in a court case is given, not on the basis of what is right but on the basis of what is expedient.This long and angry dispatch from the heart of apartheid South Africa can be an oppressive read, though for understandable reasons. Less understandable, perhaps, were the frankly terrifying number of modern parallels that emerged from this putatively historical document.The narrator at the core of the novel, Martin Mynhardt, is a hugely successful Afrikaner businessman and one of the very pillars of white-supremacist society, who thinks of himself as contributing to the good of his community and his country. He doesn't hate black people; rather, he likes to believe that apartheid is probably good for them, on balance. Extending real political power would be a mistake: ‘they've simply not developed far enough to handle such sophisticated forms of Western organisation. A matter of evolution.’Through Mynhardt we're introduced to a complex web of interlinked friends, colleagues, lovers and family members who represent a cross-section of 1970s South African society, from the rural farmstead matron to the idealistic city student, the determined black businessman to the angry white activist; lawyers, witchdoctors, religious figures and expatriates, all of them ultimately grappling with the same basic fact of life.If you have the stomach for it, experiencing the world through the eyes of a proponent of apartheid should be an educational experience. My problem was that – despite his ingratiating and plausible self-justifications – Mynhardt is made into something a bit too much like a cartoon villain. It is not enough for him to be a stalwart of racism; he is also a neglectful father, an unfaithful husband, an appalling friend, a heartless capitalist (‘people are essentially economic propositions’), a manipulative son and a serial user of the women he eyes up as ‘ripe and more than ready to be bruised’.It may be that Brink is making a point about what's now called ‘intersectionality’ – the ways racism can be related to other social or sexual hierarchies and privileges. Indeed at one point, these links are made quite explicitly by one of Mynhardt's playthings:“You're an Afrikaner, so you must be a male chauvinist.”“I fail to see what the two can have in common.”“Everything.” She sat down opposite me again, on the edge of the chair, her knees primly together. “Because this is a man's land, don't you see? Big-game, rugby, industries, power politics, racism. You Afrikaners have no room for women. The only place you assign to us is flat on our backs with our legs open for the Big Boss to in-and-out as he pleases.”But I don't believe this is representative; the whole issue with apartheid, and similar systems, is that the people who support it are very often kind-hearted folks, good family-men, attentive partners and loving parents, who simply live by means of colossal, sustained acts of cognitive dissonance. By making Mynhardt wholly objectionable, Brink loses, I think, several opportunities to make us as readers sympathise with him, which would have been a much more troubling and interesting response than simply loathing him completely from start to finish.‘I have tried with so much care,’ Mynhardt says towards the end, ‘to keep all the elements of my life apart and intact.’ His emotional apartheid is heading for a violent collapse that will mirror the one about to overtake society; as the riots break out in Soweto, there are symmetrical eruptions of tragedy and abuse in his own circle. Despite the novel's conceptual issues, it all makes for a very dark and powerful climax, as the rumours of rain finally end in the kind of downpour only Africa can produce. Read it for future tips as well as historical context.